by Ian Blake
Tiller could see the terror in the machine-gunner’s face as he lifted his carbine. He felt it jolt in his shoulder and the man pitched forward over the breech of his gun. Tiller swung the M2 away but could see no other obvious targets.
Then, immediately in front of Tiller, the Japanese officer in charge rose from the undergrowth. He must have been wounded by one of the grenades, for his jacket was ripped and one side of his face was covered in blood. In one hand he held his long, slightly curved sword. He ran straight at Tiller, screaming at the top of his voice.
‘Banzai! Banzai!’
To Tiller’s astonishment the two remaining Japanese who had not been killed or wounded, instead of running away or surrendering, took up the cry and also began charging up the slope towards the SBS men now stationary above them. They screamed as they ran, the sun glinting on the grotesquely long bayonets fixed to their rifles. But first one fell and then the other, so that only the officer, intent on reaching Tiller, remained.
For a split second fear surged through Tiller like an electric shock. He sighted his carbine and pressed the trigger. But the weapon either jammed or the magazine was empty. The Japanese was nearly on him now and Tiller’s position screened the man from Sandy’s weapon. Tiller fancied he could see the look of triumph on the officer’s face and smell the foulness of his breath. Slowly, deliberately, the man paused, raised his sword with both his hands and swung it. Instinctively Tiller ducked and heard the swish of the blade as it passed above him.
The Japanese was tall and powerfully built but the heavy sword and his wound made him stagger out of control for just long enough for Tiller to ram the muzzle of his carbine into his face with all his force. Crying out pitifully, the man raised his hands instinctively and dropped his sword.
Tiller reversed his carbine and smashed the stock against the man’s head, knocking his khaki forage cap off his shaven skull. The man staggered and as Tiller stepped backwards to draw his pistol, Sandy was able to get a clear enough view to shoot him with a burst from his carbine. The man sagged to the ground, grappled blindly for his sword, tried to regain his feet, rolled over once, and lay still.
The shooting stopped as suddenly as it had begun and a silence settled on the hollow which was broken only by the sobbing of the one surviving Japanese, who lay in the undergrowth.
The SBS patrol deployed instantly to search the area for any other survivors. But the machine-gun crew on the hilltop had decamped and there was no trace of any other Japanese. Tiller, driven to distraction by the dying sobs of the wounded Japanese, started to walk over to where he lay to see what he could do to help the man, but was stopped by a warning shout from Sandy.
‘Keep back, Tiger, for Christ’s sake. Keep away from him.’
Tiller stopped and turned and saw Dopey moving round until he had a clear view of the dying Japanese. Dopey raised his rifle.
‘Jesus, don’t do that,’ Tiller heard himself shout indignantly. He felt fury flood through him that a trained SBS man like Dopey would shoot a wounded man. He’d fucking crucify him when they got back.
Dopey ignored him. He squeezed the trigger of the carbine once. The shot rang loud in the stillness of the clearing and the sobbing stopped. For a moment the silence returned and then there was a shattering explosion as the grenade rolled out of the dead man’s hand. Its acrid smoke drifted up towards the watching SBS patrol.
‘Christ almighty,’ Tiller exclaimed quietly.
Dopey came back, refilling the magazine of his carbine as he walked.
‘One of their little tricks,’ he said nonchalantly. ‘If they’re wounded they hope you’re going to be compassionate enough to try and help them. So they hold a primed hand-grenade until you’re close enough to receive it in the face. Then they blow themselves up and take you with them. They won’t be taken prisoner.’
‘Christ almighty,’ Tiller said again. He went over to Sandy, who was searching the dead officer. ‘Thanks, Sandy.’
‘Stubborn bastards, aren’t they,’ said the Australian casually, throwing the officer’s documents up to Tiller. ‘Don’t know when to give up.’
As he caught the documents Tiller felt a sharp pain in his shoulder. He glanced down, and saw that his shirt was soaked in blood.
‘That sniper nicked you,’ said Sandy. ‘You’d better watch out.’
Aware that in that climate even the smallest cut could become infected, Tiller took out the bulky first-aid dressing from his pocket and handed it to Sandy. Sandy placed the pad over the graze and bound it tight with the bandage attached to it.
‘What sniper?’
‘You all right?’ Coates asked as he approached. He carried his rifle, as he always seemed to, tucked under his arm like a shotgun. His empty pipe, bowl downwards, was hanging from one corner of his mouth.
‘Sure. What sniper?’ Tiller felt irrationally angry that something had happened which he knew nothing about.
‘Sniper in one of those paddy-field teak trees,’ Coates said, removing the pipe and pointing the stem at one of them. ‘I thought I’d better watch out for them. It’s another of the little tricks of the trade the Japs get up to. Surprisingly, that one hadn’t tied himself to the tree as they usually do. They like doing the unexpected when they’re not being thoroughly predictable.’
‘It was certainly that. You got him?’
‘Well, no one else was going to,’ Coates said sharply. ‘And as you seemed intent on keeping me out of harm’s way I thought I’d better make myself useful somehow.’
‘You sure as hell did that,’ said Tiller. ‘You must have picked him off immediately before he’d fired.’
‘Young man, I’ve picked off – as you call it – a charging tiger inside four seconds. That’s all the time it gave me. That Jap sniper wouldn’t have given you much longer. They know always to shoot first whoever is in charge.’
Tiller accepted the rebuke without comment. He flicked through the officer’s documents quickly. Sandy had found a diary on the dead body in which some of the leaves were marked with pressed flowers. On the pages were short poems in Japanese characters.
Tiller passed it over to Coates, who said: ‘This is the form of poem they call haiku. See, each poem is divided into three parts.’
‘Code of some sort?’ Tiller asked.
Coates shook his head. ‘I doubt it. Probably genuine ones he wrote himself.’ He paused and read one of them.
Tiller peered over Coates’s shoulder and looked at the delicate pressed flowers and the precise, neat strokes of the Japanese characters on the rice-paper of the diary.
‘Love poems,’ said Coates. ‘Want a translation?’
In his mind’s eye Tiller saw again the officer’s face contorted in hatred as he ran at him screaming and waving his sword. He shook his head. He wondered if he would ever understand his new enemy.
The SBS began searching all the bodies, taking great care to make sure that none was booby-trapped. Tiller had never seen a fully clothed Japanese soldier at close quarters before. He noted the drabness of their uniforms, the curious canvas shoes with heavy rubber soles in which the big toe was separated from the rest of the foot – Sandy said they were called tobi – and the long khaki woollen puttees that they all wore from the top of their tobi to just below the knee.
As Tiller watched, two of the SBS unwound body belts from under the jackets of the dead men. They threw one of them to him to examine. It was made of silk and was finely stitched with Japanese characters. Tiller showed it to Coates.
‘It’s called a senninbari,’ Coates said. ‘Which means a thousand stitches. Their wives and sweethearts make them. The inscriptions they sew on them are supposed to bring luck.’
Tiller shook his head in silent astonishment.
After they had searched all the bodies they buried them quickly in a communal grave. Tiller decided the Taisho machine-gun might come in handy, so this was dismantled. But Coates insisted that the other Japanese weapons should not be left lying around for
the locals to gather. So they took out any moving parts and threw them into the jungle, and then dug a pit and threw the weapons in it, and covered them up.
‘What’s this then?’ Tiller held up the small mortar – it was no more than two feet in length – by its curved base plate before he threw it into the pit.
‘Fifty-mill grenade launcher,’ said Sandy. ‘We call it a knee mortar.’
‘The Japs are lousy shots,’ said Coates, ‘which is why they like squatting and not lying prone as we do. Gives them a more stable base. But what they lack in accuracy with their rifles they make up for with the use of that nifty little weapon.’
‘Is it fired from the knee, then?’ Tiller asked. He noticed that the base plate seemed conveniently shaped to place on a man’s thigh when he was kneeling.
Coates laughed. ‘Christ, no! I’ve seen others make that mistake. They ended up in hospital. Some twit in Intelligence translated "leg" as "knee". The Japs call it a "leg mortar" because they carry it strapped to one leg in a canvas container.’
Tiller threw the mortar into the pit and filled it in. Then he beckoned for the others to follow him. The machine-gun team that had escaped from the hillock would alert any Japanese in Kyaukpyu and he wanted to press on across the chaung as quickly as possible in order to locate Kyaukpyu harbour and launch the operation. They could expect further opposition and he wanted to press home his advantage before the Japanese could organize another reception for them. Also, his shoulder was getting stiff and he was worried that it might become infected. Sandy had scattered sulphonamide powder on the wound before he had bound it up but there was no guarantee it would work.
They skirted a whole succession of empty paddy-fields before coming to the first bashas of the deserted town and moved round these until they reached the coast on the far side. By now the remains of the day were fading from the sky. As it darkened, the clear patches filled with a sprinkling of stars and sporadically the full moon came from behind a cloud and, to Tiller’s consternation, flooded the ground with a pale light. The last thing he wanted, or expected, was to have to attack the boats in moonlight.
They inched their way cautiously into the town, wary of where they stepped, alert for any signs of booby-traps. The walls of some of the bashas had fallen down; others were roofless or covered in weeds, and the unpaved road between them was a tangle of grass and roots. A rat skittered across in front of them but otherwise there was no sign of life.
After a few hundred yards the road widened, the bashas gave way to several stone buildings, nearly all without their roofs, and soon it was apparent that the SBS patrol was approaching the centre of the deserted town. This was next to the harbour, which looked like a large lagoon.
The moonlight shimmered on the waters of the harbour and they could see several wavering lights glinting from the boats anchored there. Tiller, who was acting as point man, counted eight of them. Some were quite big and would need two Pin-Up Girls to sink them, which meant he barely had enough devices.
He halted the patrol and went ahead by himself to reconnoitre, but apart from some empty oil drums which lay piled in a pool of stinking oil and water, there was little to see. He decided it was best to withdraw a little way down the street they had walked along and to occupy one of the stone buildings that had retained its roof. The patrol searched all the nearby buildings and eventually returned with a young, cowering native, who was closely questioned by Coates.
‘He says the Japanese are all aboard the boats preparing to sail,’ Coates told Tiller, who was helping Sandy and Dopey assemble the collapsible canoes. ‘There are none ashore.’
‘What are the cargoes on the boats?’
‘Rice mainly, which they must have known was in the town’s storehouse. But also anything they could find that is edible. They’ve been here about a week.’
‘How many of them, does he know? How did they get here?’
Coates shot the questions at the native.
‘He says most of them came in the boats. There are no natives aboard any of them. But some arrived in a landing-craft which then left. Those are probably our friends we met by the chaung.’
‘Do we believe him?’
Coates shrugged. ‘They roped him in and the few others still living here to help them load the boats. I suppose he’s got a fair picture of what’s going on. He’s hopping mad that the Japs have pinched all their food. So he’s not a collaborator. Not unless he’s a bloody good actor.’
Tiller thought of the time pencils he had with him. ‘And he says they’re preparing to set sail tonight?’
‘Yes. The boats are fully loaded, so my guess is they’ll wait for the moon to set and then push off. It’s only a couple of hours to the mainland but they wouldn’t want to risk being caught by any of our sea patrols in moonlight in open water.’
Tiller’s shoulder was beginning to ache intolerably. ‘That means we’ve got to paddle out to them, lay the Pin-Ups, and then escape, all in what amounts to broad daylight,’ he said.
‘We’ll set up the Taisho so we can give you covering fire if necessary. Are you using both canoes?’
Tiller nodded.
‘That’ll leave three of us ashore. That should be enough. There can’t be many Japs aboard those boats.’
‘But they’ll be expecting an attack,’ Tiller reminded him.
‘They might have been expecting one while they were ashore,’ said Coates. ‘They won’t be expecting the kind you’re planning on. They probably think they’re as safe as houses out on the water.’
Tiller remained doubtful. ‘No sailor’s so fucking stupid as to think that.’
‘They won’t be sailors,’ Coates predicted confidently. ‘The Japanese Navy doesn’t concern itself with helping to feed the Japanese Army. The two services loathe each other even more than they loathe us. They’ll be army personnel.’
Sandy came up to them. ‘The canoes are ready, Sarge,’ he said. ‘Six Pin-Ups in each. Shall we take them down to the harbour?’
Tiller nodded. He turned to Coates. ‘How long before the moon sets, Dick?’
‘Three hours,’ Coates said immediately.
‘I want six-hour time pencils for the Pin-Ups,’ Tiller said to Sandy. ‘If they aren’t well out to sea at that time, then the Burmese government will have to go stuff itself. I’ll follow you down. Let’s find a good place to set up the machine-gun, Dick.’
They found a roofless stone building next to the harbour which from its first floor gave a clear all-round view of it and called two of the SBS patrol up with the Taisho.
‘On no account fire until I send up a red Very light,’ Tiller told them. ‘Then engage first the boat that’s showing the most fight. But be bloody careful. I don’t want to be shot up by you two bastards.’
The men grinned and secured the machine-gun’s tripod firmly by piling rubble around its feet. They had identified it as an even older model than the ‘woodpecker’. Tiller had been told at the firearms school in Chittagong that they had been phased out of the Japanese Army some years before. Obviously the Japanese in the Arakan were mostly equipped with obsolete weapons.
All SBS men in the Far East theatre had been trained to handle Japanese weapons and now, in readiness for the action they hoped would come, they stripped down the mechanism expertly, oiled it and reassembled it.
‘Where will you be?’ Tiller asked Coates after they returned to their temporary headquarters.
‘I’ll go to the other end of the harbour,’ Coates replied. ‘Then I can cover you if you decide to land there after laying the Pin-Ups.’
Tiller hesitated and then asked: ‘What were those Japs shouting when they charged us? A war cry of some sort, was it?’
‘Banzai,’ said Coates. ‘A Banzai charge is the last act of a defeated force. They just charge the opposition regardless. It’s a death cry more than a war cry. Comes from the Japanese "Tenno heika banzai", which means "long live the Emperor". The Japs consider their emperor a deity, as you know.�
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‘Jesus,’ said Tiller quietly. He could not get the contorted face of the Japanese officer as he ran towards him out of his mind.
The SBS men had launched the two collapsible canoes in deep shadow on the edge of the harbour, sheltered by a cluster of tall reeds. Dopey and his crewman were already in their canoe, their paddles resting across it. Sandy crouched by the other one and, after Tiller had climbed into the rear cockpit, slid quickly into the front one. Then, with a few swift strokes, they left the reeds and rafted up while they considered the best line of attack.
They were now so low in the water it was difficult to see their targets and they decided it was safer for both canoes to keep together until they were near enough to see where exactly the craft were anchored.
Tiller led the way. He moved around the edge of the harbour so that the silhouettes of the canoes merged with the low land that rimmed it. As they paddled, the monsoon cloud covered the moon and before long it began to rain.
10
‘Dareka Okiteru?’
The shout rang out across the dark water like a challenge. Tiller and Sandy froze in mid-stroke and slumped forward to minimize their profile.
‘Dareka Okiteru?’
The beam from a powerful torch stabbed the darkness from one of the boats which was anchored to the left of the canoes. It seemed to waver uncertainly before being directed on to the deck of another boat anchored on the extreme left of the group. Tiller raised his head with infinite care and could just see the dark shadow of the Japanese holding the torch.
‘Dareka Okiteru?’
The torch sliced away to another boat and caught in its beam a soldier sitting on the deck with his rifle across his knees. He protected his eyes from the shaft of light and shouted back: ‘Damare. Nenasai.’
The words were harsh and urgent but the figures showed no urgent action. Were they words of warning? Tiller felt the adrenalin begin to pump through him. The Japanese might have seen them, or heard something. He couldn’t tell. As a precaution he began undoing the toggles that secured his carbine to the inside of the canoe.
